Saint Petersburg Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation

The course will concentrate on the relationship of philosophy and scientific thought in the Greco-Roman world, from the Presocratics through the Hellenistic age up to the close of classical antiquity. We would like to investigate how mathematics, natural sciences, astronomy, and medicine influenced philosophy, and on the other hand, how philosophy and its methods and techniques framed science and scientific knowledge. Our intention is that the course should address basic questions of interrelatedness, and should show how questions asked and methods used either in science or in philosophy fertilized other areas of intellectual activity. The focus will be on questions concerning the structure of knowledge, methodology, second order theories, argumentativity, demonstrational techniques, and polemics.